Oh Gerd, It’s Friggin’ 2018 Already, I survived and here’s a retrospective!
Overall 2017 was a successful year, but the ride was an emotionally and physically brutal train wreck, figuratively and literally. Here it is the first and I’m recovering and hoping that 2018 is better. But before diving into 2018 I’ve got to recollect just a few things for 2017.
Peloton become Pelotech. For most of my work in 2017 I knocked out a few key projects for Pelotech. First was the build out, expansion, and management of their branding and online presence. Follow @Pelotechnology on Twitter, or for a few business links and topics they now have a LinkedIn Pelotech Page.
While also I got to step in and build some awesome CI/CD systems, software solutions, and modernized a number of projects for a variety of companies including Nordstrom, Impinj, and others. We used some pretty excellent tools too including Rancher, Drone.io, Kubernetes, and a host of others in addition to our regular stacks for Node.js, Go, and even .NET in some places. Joachim even knocked out an impressive .NET core app with React and other components; pt 1 & pt 2.
Beyond that I’ve started multiple courses that will be released this year, some with LinkedIn Learning (prev Lynda .com). The courses range from Terraform, to Kubernetes and Go, and related technologies. These have been a lot of fun to learn about, prepare, and setup for an audience ready to learn and use these technologies. I’ve always enjoyed teaching people that are curious and I’m sure I’ll do a lot of that in 2018 too.
.NET Fringe took place again this last year too. Again, it was an awesome lot of fun. Again, a great geek train crew. Again a lot of fun to lead the fringe bike ride. .NET Fringe has turned into more than I think Troy, Glenn, myself, or others ever really thought it could have. Hopefully we can keep it going, albeit 2018 is a bit cloudy so far, at least for me when it comes to organizing events.
I wrote a short retrospective on .NET Fringe and what makes a great conference, if you’re organizing and looking for that feel, this may be a helpful read.
Beyond just the professional I’ve become a mortgage and US homeowner statistic! Yay! I think. It was an inordinate amount of work in my opinion and the verdicts out on the actual benefits over time. But as for a place to live, having a home to return to every day, a home that will eventually be owned is a rather pleasant feeling.
Here toward the end of the year, December 18th was kind of a summary however amidst all the other things. I’ve wrapped up my work with Pelotech, survived a train wreck, and am looking forward to getting into some new projects this year (more on this real soon).
Other than these things, 2017 was a year I’d promised myself I’d lay low, maybe even drop the ball if necessary, and kind of just relax. I wasn’t real successful at that and I’ll just have to consider 2017 a failed extended vacation. For now, Phil Haack & Hadi Hariri summarized my sentiment perfectly.
Anyway, that’s my retrospective for 2017, now time to put together some of those resolutions for 2018!
